


Five Things Skye's Hair Has Meant to Her

by RowboatCop



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coulson and his ridiculous crush on Skye, Day 7, F/M, POV Skye | Daisy Johnson, Skye's Hair, Skye's backstory, Skye's haircut, St. Agnes Orphanage, free theme, fuck the skye haters, skoulsonfest2k15redux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 07:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4470134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/pseuds/RowboatCop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(plus one)</p><p>Short little thing about Skye's hair. (It's meant love and family and friendship and security and a chance to take control of her life. But it's never defined who she is.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things Skye's Hair Has Meant to Her

**1.**

“You have such beautiful hair, Mary Sue.”

She’s six years old, and it’s the first time anyone ever tells her that.

Mrs. Lin has thick, shiny, dark hair — even darker than her own, almost black — and it’s hypnotic to watch her new foster mother brush it, dark strands slipping through the boar bristle brush.

“Come sit with me. I’ll brush yours,” Mrs. Lin offers, and it’s tempting.

Still, she’s hesitant. It’s not that she’s shy, exactly — she’s not, she’s already been reprimanded by the sisters for her tendency to say whatever’s on her mind — but she’s learned to be cautious around new families.

“It’s okay,” Mrs. Lin tells her with a kind smile. The kind of smile that you instantly like. “You don’t have to. But if you want to, it feels nice.”

It’s just the right thing to say to a six year old with trust issues.

So she goes.

She climbs up onto the couch, a dark blue fabric patterned with light blue and yellow flowers, and puts herself in Mrs. Lin’s hands.

The first few strokes are tentative, getting out tangles at the ends of her hair, and then the brush presses against her scalp and drags slowly down the length of her hair.

She shudders at the feeling, at the tingling at the back of her head, down her neck.

“See? Feels good.”

Mrs. Lin’s voice is calm and soothing, and she talks quietly as she brushes.

It becomes a nightly ritual for as long as she stays with them. Before bed, they sit together on the couch and brush their hair, they talk about things, and a few times she even gets to brush Mrs. Lin’s hair.

Of course, she doesn’t get to stay. She never gets to stay, but she hasn’t learned this, yet, and she cries every night for a week once she’s back in her blank little white room at St. Agnes.

And then she brushes her hair.

It’s still there, years later when Mrs. Lin is really just a hazy memory — brushing her hair leaves her feeling like a beautiful girl, like things in the world just make more sense.

 

**2.**

“You just twist it like this,” Brandi shows her in the mirror, and her hair is suddenly coiled in a perfect french braid.

It makes her feel so grown up; grown up in the way only a ten year old can feel.

“Thank you,” she breathes, sort of amazed that her hair can look like this.

“No one’s ever braided your hair?” Her foster sister asks the question as though it’s unthinkable.

She shakes her head as she runs her fingers along the braid, feeling out the perfectly smooth edges, and doesn’t quite notice the look of pity she gets.

“Tonight before bed, I’ll show you how to do a twist braid. You sleep in it, and it makes your hair wavy.”

She just nods, fascinated by this world of options for her hair.

She never knew, no one ever told her.

Of course, they send her away a few months later, but Brandi sends her with a kit of pins and hair ties and soft foam curlers for sleeping in.

She cries. She always cries, even when it’s expected, she still cries.

And then she brushes her hair and twists it into braid, so that in the morning it’s shiny and perfectly wavy, and every time she looks in the mirror, she remembers that someone loved her.

 

**3.**

“You just put it in like that — _gently_ ,” she hisses quietly as the bobby pin stabs her scalp.

“Sorry,” the young girl doing her hair frowns.

“It’s okay, you just do it like this,” and she demonstrates on herself to her little crowd of onlookers.

She’s fifteen, and the younger girls like to play with her hair, like to learn from her how to do their own hair.

She sort of likes teaching them.

“Like this.”

This past Christmas was spent with a foster family, and she came out of it with a whole box full of hair accessories including little butterfly clips and tiny rubber bands and colorful bobby pins and barrettes with animals on them.

They’re good because they’re fun even for the girls with hair types she doesn’t know and can’t really help with. It puts them all on a more equal footing, able to crowd around the mirror and play — even though the sisters disapprove of her teaching the girls to value material possessions and their looks.

Well fuck that. She knows better than anyone that everyone deserves to feel beautiful.

And it feels good to be that person, the one that makes other people feel loved.

When she leaves St. Agnes for good, she leaves her box of hair accessories, as many of them as she can spare.

 

**4.**

She’s living out of a van on basically no money, but she still brushes her hair every night and twists it into a braid like she has most nights since she was ten.

And a huge amount of her basically no money goes towards her hair care.

Miles had once laughed at her, joked that she was the last person he’d have thought to be vain. He didn’t mean it as an insult, not really, because Miles loved her hair, and she understands that maybe it seems weird.

And, well, maybe she _is_ vain. Maybe it’s vain to enjoy feeling beautiful.

She doesn’t really care.

Besides, especially now, having beautiful hair is so helpful.

No one thinks you’re homeless when your hair is perfect, and it’s amazing how much more someone is willing to help you out if they don’t know you’re homeless.

Feeling good about herself, feeling like she's beautiful, and remembering that people have loved her — those are a bonus.

 

**5.**

She misses normality.

Coulson is halfway across the world most of the time, May is great but sort of distant in her new role, Simmons is gone, Fitz is withdrawn and hardly looks at her when she sits with him.

Oh, and her former SO, _who she actually made out with_ , has turned out to be a traitorous Nazi who’s now living in their basement, so that’s fun, too. Awesome, really.

Trip is basically her saving grace — they spend virtually all their time together, even though at first it’s mostly a matter of commiserating over how much they miss Simmons.

(Trip _really_ misses Simmons.)

“I think I’m going to get bangs,” Skye tells him one day while they’re drinking beer in the lounge with cartoons in the background.

“Am I supposed to have strong feelings about this?”

Skye laughs and arranges her hair, tries to mimic having bangs, and does her best _model_ face as she turns from side to side.

Trip just raises his eyebrows, gives her this _look_ , where he pretends he doesn’t care about what she’s talking about, but really he does.

She likes that about Trip — he always cares about what she’s talking about.

“Simmons always said I would probably regret it.”

His face falls at the mention of her name, and Skye feels bad.

“You should do it,” he tells her, like it’s some sort of rebellion.

Against Simmons. Which, yeah okay, that's dumb.

It’s not like she hates Simmons, of course she doesn’t. Except when she kind of does, when she thinks about her friend abandoning her. And it’s selfish, maybe, and she should be better about it.

But right now it’s fresh, so maybe she can be forgiven for feeling it too sharply.

Trip takes her into town the next day and holds her hand while she gets bangs because that’s what friends do — they hold your hand while you make potentially stupid life decisions.

(It’s not that stupid, though, she actually likes them a lot.)

When Simmons gets back, Skye feels bad for her anger and her pseudo rebellion.

But actually, Simmons really likes the bangs anyways.

 

**+1**

Coulson follows her into her room when she gets back from the salon, after she debuts her new hair.

“It looks good.”

“I know.”

Admittedly, she had been a little more nervous than enthusiastic at first, so she gets why he wants to reassure her.

She turns sideways in her full length mirror, trying to get something like a profile view.

It does look good. Even with her nerves, it’s not like she worried that it looked bad.

It’s just that she’s had long hair for her entire life so far, and it’s...different.

“Why did you decide to cut it?”

“I like to change,” she tells him, not sure if that fully explains it.

“You’ve worn a lot of hats in your life,” Coulson tells her, making it sound like this is something admirable about her — her many metaphorical hats.

But then, a lot of what he says about her comes off sounding like he admires her.

She likes that about him.

And however important her hair has been to her, it’s not like her whole self has been tied up in the length of it. All the things that matter, those are still with her. She can change without that stuff changing.

Plus, her hair isn’t, like, gone. It’s still here on her head, still part of who she is.

“And I still have options with this. It’s just a little different.”

“It looks good,” he repeats, and when she turns to face the mirror straight on again, she’s surprised at how close he is behind her, surprised that she hadn’t felt him approach.

She watches her reflection as Coulson reaches out his right hand and touches the back of her bob, soft and gentle as he smooths down the back of her head.

Skye freezes, even her breath freezes in her chest.

When she doesn’t object, Coulson seems to get braver, and he pushes his hand further up into her hair until she can feel his fingernails softly scratch across her scalp before he draws his fingers down, letting strands of hair slip between them.

She exhales, a shaky sound that’s way too loud in the room.

It’s been so long since someone has run their fingers through her hair like this, this kind of intimate touch.

It might be the most intimate touch they’ve ever shared.

“I’m glad you like it,” she whispers, her voice not quite steady, _knees_ not quite steady.

“I really do.”

This time, his hand curves around to the front, to touch the longer layers, and she watches his face — his intense focus on her hair.

“Coulson?” She whispers his name, a little afraid that the moment might vanish if she calls attention to it but even more afraid that he might play it off as nothing if she doesn’t.

His eyes snap to meet hers in the mirror, and she can see him swallow and then step closer, letting her feel the length of his body against her back.

“Skye.”

She lifts her right hand behind her to touch the back of his head, to run her fingers through the short ends of his hair. His left hand, the robotic one, curls around her hip in response.

And she likes to change, likes to put the past behind her and move forward towards better things.

Apparently Coulson does, too.

  



End file.
